OT: Best Free Email (POP Only)

[Jim Thompson]

Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...

Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(

So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
from my website, then POP it to me.

Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.

Recommendations?

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

[rickman]

On 11/8/2014 11:19 AM, Jim Thompson wrote:
> Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
> Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
> it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
> everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
> So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
> from my website, then POP it to me.
>
> Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
> Recommendations?

Are you hosting through your ISP? If not they shouldn't be messing with
your mail.

I have an unlimited hosting account with eboundhost.com and can do a
million different things with my email. I can use spam filtering or not
or redirect it through Google to act as a spam filter, which is what I
do.

If you are looking for inexpensive hosting, I would be willing to give
you a free account under my hosting. I already do this for a number of
my friends. Check out coldwatersafety.org.

--

Rick

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> Gave us:

>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>from my website, then POP it to me.
>
>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
>Recommendations?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

If you have an android type phone, you likely already have a gmail
account. Perhaps that would facilitate a way to filter by source, thus
making it easy for you to tell which are web site related. Especially
if you do not actually already use the account. I do not know what
filtration features it has. Likely varies from device to device.

[Martin Riddle]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>from my website, then POP it to me.
>
>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
>Recommendations?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

Maybe Outlook.com. We have the hosted exchange and spam is really at
a minimum, with virtually no false positives. You can set it up for
POP.
The Ad-Free outlook is $20/yr, it was hotmail-plus.


Cheers

[qrk]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>from my website, then POP it to me.
>
>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
>Recommendations?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

Gmail has a pop/smtp service you can enable. Works fine. Only problem,
you need to go to their web interface to clean stuff out since the pop
service is limited in scope.

Another option is pick up a $10/mo service that allows you to host a
web site and use your own domain. They usually give you email service
that has limit control over what you can do. The one I use allows .exe
files which is important. Cox likes to filter everything.

--
Mark

[Jim Thompson]

Hey, Mark How goes it? Still "pinging" ;-)

Cox must be leftist... all this nanny-state nonsense >:-}

[rickman]

$10 a month is pricey. I believe I am paying $60 a year for unlimited
domain hosting and have some half dozen accounts hosted. At one time I
was hosting gnuarm.com and used over a TB of bandwidth per month.

--

Rick

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>from my website, then POP it to me.
>
>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
>Recommendations?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

[Jim Thompson]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:57:46 -0800, John Larkin
<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>
>>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>
>>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>>from my website, then POP it to me.
>>
>>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>
>>Recommendations?
>>
>> ...Jim Thompson
>
>Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.

Real helpful, John =D> Spend it where?

[David Brown]

On 08/11/14 17:19, Jim Thompson wrote:
> Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
> Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
> it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
> everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
> So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
> from my website, then POP it to me.
>
> Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
> Recommendations?
>

Why POP? The only use of POP is in fetchmail scripts to then pass on
the mail to a proper mailserver (as an alternative to setting up a
mailserver that will receive the mail directly). POP is a hopeless
choice if you are using a mail client - with normal setups, the single
client pulls everything off the server. That means you can only connect
one machine to the account, and when that machine fails or corrupts its
mailfile, you have lost everything. (You can, in theory, leave mail
undeleted on the server - but with POP that brings its own problems.)

I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't
avoid it).

So with that in mind, you could do far worse than a gmail account - it
is reliable, easy to use, works fine with IMAP, and has a workable web
interface for when you need it.

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 13:38:49 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:57:46 -0800, John Larkin
><jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
>><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>>
>>>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>>>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>>>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>>
>>>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>>>from my website, then POP it to me.
>>>
>>>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>>
>>>Recommendations?
>>>
>>> ...Jim Thompson
>>
>>Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.
>
>Real helpful, John =D> Spend it where?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

On an ISP that has real customer support, and provides Spam Gauntlet.

SG quarantines and then deletes about 97% of my email, all the spam,
with zero false positives and only a few marginal cases leaking
through.

[John Larkin]

POP works fine for me, with Thunderbird. Most of my PCs are set to
"leave messages on server" and my main PC is set to "delete after 30
days".

I only keep one PC neat, with all my mail nicely sorted and trimmed.
Now and then I copy the Tbird profiles from that one to all the messy
satellites.

I back up Profiles daily to a terabyte USB drive.

[Jim Thompson]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 12:58:01 -0800, John Larkin

<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 13:38:49 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:57:46 -0800, John Larkin
>><jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
>>><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>>>
>>>>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>>>>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>>>>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>>>
>>>>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>>>>from my website, then POP it to me.
>>>>
>>>>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>>>
>>>>Recommendations?
>>>>
>>>> ...Jim Thompson
>>>
>>>Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.
>>
>>Real helpful, John =D> Spend it where?
>>
>> ...Jim Thompson
>
>On an ISP that has real customer support, and provides Spam Gauntlet.
>
>SG quarantines and then deletes about 97% of my email, all the spam,
>with zero false positives and only a few marginal cases leaking
>through.

I don't have a _spam_ problem, I have a problem with a jerk-off ISP
that marks anything commercial as spam... in the subject line... which
is a royal nuisance.

[Wanderer]

It's not free, but I use the $6.95/month dialup4less plan. I was using them for dial up when I started using broadband and never changed my email address. No complaints for at least 10 years now.

[Jasen Betts]

On 2014-11-08, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
> Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
> Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
> it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
> everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
> So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
> from my website, then POP it to me.
>
> Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
> Recommendations?

Ever hear of "mail.analog-innovations.com"?
is so explain why it's not a good solution.
if not you should definatily ask someone who knows about it.

it's already got a pop-3 server installed, you probably just need
to setup the mailboxes not forward to your ISP and point your mail
client at it.

--
umop apisdn

[RobertMacy]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@on-my-web-site.com> wrote:

> Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>
> Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
> it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
> everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>
> So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
> from my website, then POP it to me.
>
> Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>
> Recommendations?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

free?
I use google's gmail for this. so far not much spam makes it to the
inbox. have set up for text only, which may help. Images are filled in
ONLY if you request, otherwise I get a lot of boxes and text.

With a google account you can also get voice line/mail. VERY cheap
international calls, like $0.02/min to Brazil vs ?? free domestic calls,
anywhere. And the capability for voice to text conversion and then google
voice sends you THAT voice message as an email. Good for record keeping.


for cheap?
Call BasicISP.net

BasicISP.net (800) 456-3118
PO Box 511
Mount Vernon, OH 43050


EVERYTIME I call them I reach a US citizen/person who gives knowledgeable
help. basic access on the order of $90/yr ?? so far NO spam makes it to
my INBOX.

[Jim Thompson]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 10:25:33 -0800, qrk <Spam...@spam.net> wrote:

>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>
>>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>
>>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>>from my website, then POP it to me.
>>
>>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>
>>Recommendations?
>>
>> ...Jim Thompson
>
>Gmail has a pop/smtp service you can enable. Works fine. Only problem,
>you need to go to their web interface to clean stuff out since the pop
>service is limited in scope.

Works... bypasses the Cox a..holes.

>
>Another option is pick up a $10/mo service that allows you to host a
>web site and use your own domain. They usually give you email service
>that has limit control over what you can do. The one I use allows .exe
>files which is important. Cox likes to filter everything.

[qrk]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:42:04 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 10:25:33 -0800, qrk <Spam...@spam.net> wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 09:19:18 -0700, Jim Thompson
>><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>>
>>>Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam after
>>>it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just about
>>>everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>>
>>>So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email to
>>>from my website, then POP it to me.
>>>
>>>Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>>
>>>Recommendations?
>>>
>>> ...Jim Thompson
>>
>>Gmail has a pop/smtp service you can enable. Works fine. Only problem,
>>you need to go to their web interface to clean stuff out since the pop
>>service is limited in scope.
>>
>>Another option is pick up a $10/mo service that allows you to host a
>>web site and use your own domain. They usually give you email service
>>that has limit control over what you can do. The one I use allows .exe
>>files which is important. Cox likes to filter everything.
>
>Hey, Mark How goes it? Still "pinging" ;-)
>
>Cox must be leftist... all this nanny-state nonsense >:-}
>
> ...Jim Thompson

Yo Jim,
Still pinging away, but moved the company to Austin, TX 1.5 years ago.
Kind of a poopoo hole compared to SB.

--
Mark

[default]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 14:07:18 -0700, Jim Thompson

I like fastmail.com, $10/year

[Jim Thompson]

The snow must make it hard on your feet >:-}

Doing any chip designs?

[Phil Hobbs]

On 11/8/2014 3:46 PM, David Brown wrote:
> On 08/11/14 17:19, Jim Thompson wrote:
>> Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>
>> Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam
>> after it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just
>> about everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>
>> So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email
>> to from my website, then POP it to me.
>>
>> Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>
>> Recommendations?
>>
>
> Why POP? The only use of POP is in fetchmail scripts to then pass on
> the mail to a proper mailserver (as an alternative to setting up a
> mailserver that will receive the mail directly). POP is a hopeless
> choice if you are using a mail client - with normal setups, the
> single client pulls everything off the server.

Only if you set it up wrong. Plus most mail hosting outfits let you
turn that off at the server. Even Gmail.

> That means you can only connect one machine to the account, and when
> that machine fails or corrupts its mailfile, you have lost
> everything. (You can, in theory, leave mail undeleted on the server
> - but with POP that brings its own problems.)
>
> I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't
> avoid it).

You've got that exactly backwards. With POP, you can have N local
copies of everything. I have email backups going back into the 1980s,
from half a dozen email servers. Good luck doing that with IMAP.

>
> So with that in mind, you could do far worse than a gmail account -
> it is reliable, easy to use, works fine with IMAP, and has a workable
> web interface for when you need it.

I use Rackspace, which I'm pretty happy with. AFAICT they don't spy on
my mail to sell me stuff, either. I also have them automatically
forward all my mail to another separate hosting company, so that I
automatically have failover.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

[Jim Thompson]

I have gmail up and running... perfectly fine for my needs...
circumvents Cox' spam filtering.

I _was_ running POP from Cox, now from gmail, no big deal. As for
confusing copies, I don't have that problem... my son Aaron wrote me a
handler that forwards to my cell when I'm traveling, replies go back
thru my PC, then outbound... the PC does the housekeeping, filing
everything in its appropriate mailbox/folder.

Of course I'm running the most modern Email client ever... Eudora Pro
v7.1.0.9 (paid mode, so I still have all those nice filtering
mechanisms operational >:-}

[rickman]

I offered you hosting that would include all the email you want and
someone else asked about the email you get with your hosted URL. Why do
you feel the need for a third party email service? Why not use the
email that is part of your web site hosting? I see you have email set
up through website...@analog-innovations.com. Why not use
analog-innovations.com for all your email?

--

Rick

[rickman]

On 11/9/2014 6:10 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
>

> Of course I'm running the most modern Email client ever... Eudora Pro
> v7.1.0.9 (paid mode, so I still have all those nice filtering
> mechanisms operational >:-}

Shoot, I missed the most important part. I have been using Eudora for
nearly 20 years now. Well, as long as I can remember anyway. Even
though the bug fixes have stopped, bug additions are also absent and I
think that is a more than fair tradeoff. If I start using Linux, I'm
not sure what I will do. Maybe Eudora will run under WINE.

--

Rick

[David Brown]

On 09/11/14 19:35, Phil Hobbs wrote:
> On 11/8/2014 3:46 PM, David Brown wrote:
>> On 08/11/14 17:19, Jim Thompson wrote:
>>> Cox is driving me nuts with their nanny-state behavior...
>>>
>>> Their Spam trap only allows options on where to send the spam
>>> after it's marked... no way to opt out of any marking... so just
>>> about everything I receive is marked "-- Spam --" :-(
>>>
>>> So I'm looking for a free Email service that I can forward Email
>>> to from my website, then POP it to me.
>>>
>>> Some service that won't stick ads into incoming mail.
>>>
>>> Recommendations?
>>>
>>
>> Why POP? The only use of POP is in fetchmail scripts to then pass on
>> the mail to a proper mailserver (as an alternative to setting up a
>> mailserver that will receive the mail directly). POP is a hopeless
>> choice if you are using a mail client - with normal setups, the
>> single client pulls everything off the server.
>
> Only if you set it up wrong. Plus most mail hosting outfits let you
> turn that off at the server. Even Gmail.
>

You only need to get it wrong once to screw your whole setup. You set
up client 1 to collect by POP but leave the messages on the server. You
set up client 2 the same, and you've got the messages on both. You set
up client 3, but forget to set the "leave messages on server" box before
you start, and they are gone from the server.

But more importantly, using POP3 like this only works if you have a
small number of messages, no structure (such as folders), no interest in
tracking outgoing emails, and are happy to "read" the same email on
every client. It was perhaps not too bad a decade ago, but when you
have had an email account under heavy use for some years, you want
something better. And when you have multiple clients (such as a
telephone, a pad, a couple of desktops, a laptop - plus webmail clients)
with the same email account, you want them synchronised and the
incoming, archived and sent emails all available.

>> That means you can only connect one machine to the account, and when
>> that machine fails or corrupts its mailfile, you have lost
>> everything. (You can, in theory, leave mail undeleted on the server
>> - but with POP that brings its own problems.)
>>
>> I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't
>> avoid it).
>
> You've got that exactly backwards. With POP, you can have N local
> copies of everything. I have email backups going back into the 1980s,
> from half a dozen email servers. Good luck doing that with IMAP.

You can backup your local copies of IMAP mails without trouble. A
decent desktop email client will happily let you download folders for
"offline use" - then you save the folders in whatever backup system you
want. For more sophisticated backup, use imapsync to make copies
(including updating old backups, rather than downloading everything
again) - and you can serve out these downloaded copies using an IMAP
server so that your backup copies are conveniently accessible.

Of course, the best idea is to make sure the server has good backups and
replication, such as by using a solid server company or doing your own
imap serving.

>>
>> So with that in mind, you could do far worse than a gmail account -
>> it is reliable, easy to use, works fine with IMAP, and has a workable
>> web interface for when you need it.
>
> I use Rackspace, which I'm pretty happy with. AFAICT they don't spy on
> my mail to sell me stuff, either. I also have them automatically
> forward all my mail to another separate hosting company, so that I
> automatically have failover.
>

<http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/rackspace-email-imap-vs-pop>

"We at Rackspace Strongly recommend using an IMAP connection with
Rackspace Email"

[Phil Hobbs]

That's way too much like work. I just turn off deletion on the server,
and use POP3 everyplace. Knowing when I last read my mail takes care of
the multiple new messages problem, so it isn't an issue.

[David Brown]

Registering a gmail account, then connecting by imap is not a great deal
of work. It is far less work than messing around with pop3 backups - it
is even less work than remembering to disable server deletion on pop3.
And if you prefer Rackspace to gmail, using imap is not exactly rocket
science there either. The hosting company will handle the backups.

[Phil Hobbs]

We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
(including some from VM mainframe days).

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

>On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:

[snip]

>>
>We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>(including some from VM mainframe days).
>
>Cheers
>
>Phil Hobbs

Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

I certainly wouldn't have folders on gmail. What I have is all
mailbox/folder sorting done at my local PC.

I'm rather extreme >:-} but I have several hundred E-mail addresses
via my website, which forward to two on gmail, from whence I retrieve
them with Eudora, which sorts them into the appropriate location.

Outbound I simply use Cox... they (so far) don't screw with outbound
E-mail (as long as you're not running a list server).

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
><ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
>>On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>[snip]
>>>
>>We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>(including some from VM mainframe days).
>>
>>Cheers
>>
>>Phil Hobbs
>
>Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>additionally written to CD's or DVD's.

Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.

DVDs are so last century.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin
<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> Gave us:

>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
>><ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>
>>>On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>>[snip]
>>>>
>>>We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>>have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>>concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>>isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>>Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>>backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>>(including some from VM mainframe days).
>>>
>>>Cheers
>>>
>>>Phil Hobbs
>>
>>Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>>additionally written to CD's or DVD's.
>
>Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
>daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.
>
>DVDs are so last century.

Even better would be to use a full RAID system with 5 or more drives,
and you could do your backups onto mSATA SSDs, which take up about 1
40th the volume of a 3.5 inch platter based drive, AND they are way
faster too.

At the end of it, you have a bunch of really good SSDs to fashion your
next RAID array out of. Eventually, you'll have a RAID array wherever
you keep or generate sensitive data, and you would eventually make you
back ups onto RAID arrays as well. Get a nice, deep floor safe
(installed into a slab) and you do not have to worry about "off site"
requisites any more either. The drive form factors allow easy use of
the safe. No more lugging drives from place to place.

Smaller SSDs are cheaper, so a RAID array of them is a cheaper build,
and results in a more reliable data store, AND it works nearly an order
of magnitude faster, so even makes all those SPICE guys happy, even
though they do not know where the bottleneck is in that process either..

[Phil Hobbs]

On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
> <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
>> <ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>>
>>> We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>> have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>> concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>> isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>> Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>> backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>> (including some from VM mainframe days).
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>>
>>> Phil Hobbs
>>
>> Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>> additionally written to CD's or DVD's.
>
> Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
> daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.
>
> DVDs are so last century.
>
>

I have a couple of 3-TB RAID-5 NAS boxes, one at the lab and one at home.

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin

<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
>><ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>
>>>On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>>[snip]
>>>>
>>>We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>>have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>>concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>>isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>>Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>>backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>>(including some from VM mainframe days).
>>>
>>>Cheers
>>>
>>>Phil Hobbs
>>
>>Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>>additionally written to CD's or DVD's.
>
>Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
>daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.
>
>DVDs are so last century.

But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
original copy.

[John Larkin]

All my three "work" PCs have front-panel hot-plug RAID drives. Never
had a failure. What's cool is that I can clone my work PC OS to my
home and cabin PCs easily. And I can occasionally drop off a full
drive as a spare/backup/checkpoint, with everything installed and
ready to run if needed.

>
> At the end of it, you have a bunch of really good SSDs to fashion your
>next RAID array out of. Eventually, you'll have a RAID array wherever
>you keep or generate sensitive data, and you would eventually make you
>back ups onto RAID arrays as well. Get a nice, deep floor safe
>(installed into a slab) and you do not have to worry about "off site"
>requisites any more either. The drive form factors allow easy use of
>the safe. No more lugging drives from place to place.
>
> Smaller SSDs are cheaper, so a RAID array of them is a cheaper build,
>and results in a more reliable data store, AND it works nearly an order
>of magnitude faster, so even makes all those SPICE guys happy, even
>though they do not know where the bottleneck is in that process either..

I think my Spice runs are compute limited. Possibly slowed down by
logging sim data to disk. I'm seeing about 55% CPU load by LT Spice on
my switcher sim. So maybe a non-RAID SSD would help there, for temp
storage of the sim data.

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 12:21:22 -0500, Phil Hobbs

We're cutting over from old klunky server boxes to tiny RAID NAS boxes
sitting on a shelf. Much easier.

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:27:14 -0700, Jim Thompson

My backup problem isn't losing copies, it's having too many!

We do multiple rolling hard-drive backups of all our official company
files. And once a month, it gets written to a metal-tube-O-ring USB
memory stick, with copies of that all over California.

[Phil Hobbs]

Mine are Synology DS411slim, which was recently discontinued but is
still in support. I basically just use it for local NetBIOS and remote
SSH/SFTP. The discs are HGST 1.5 TB 2.5-inch, and have been running for
six months or so, non-stop. I had one infant-mortality failure, but the
other seven have been working flawlessly (zero restarts on S.M.A.R.T).

I have both of them on IBM-rebadged APS SmartUPS 750 UPSes that I got on
eBay for about $50 each.

The NAS knows how to talk to the UPS to make sure it shuts down cleanly
in the event of a long power outage.

But I still take DVD images occasionally.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:27:14 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> Gave us:

>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin
><jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
>><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
>>><ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>>>[snip]
>>>>>
>>>>We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>>>have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>>>concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>>>isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>>>Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>>>backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>>>(including some from VM mainframe days).
>>>>
>>>>Cheers
>>>>
>>>>Phil Hobbs
>>>
>>>Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>>>additionally written to CD's or DVD's.
>>
>>Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
>>daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.
>>
>>DVDs are so last century.
>
>But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives...

No. They die specifically after aging, which they do too. Storing in
warm environs shortens that life and increases likelihood of data
dropout.

Burned discs are not burned holes, but mere polymer "impingements"
(impressions) which have enough contrast ratio over a flat area to be
called a bit switch (a pit). They are not pits. They can and do
"relax".

> I had one
>die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
>original copy.

You are correct. USB drives are lame inasmuch as when they fail, they
take the whole volume with them.

I use an mSATA drive in an enclosure and USB3 interface. Even in a
USB2 port, it blazes. And data loss is confined to the last file that
was open as the power loss happened type thing, just like real hard
drives.

That or the new M.2 variety. They are the true future. I will be
building an M.2 RAID array soon. Then no data loss even without a
backup.
Well... I'd have to lose three drives to lose data.


Anyway... direct USB stick is bad, yes.

HARD Drive in an enclosure, connected by USB is far better,and optical
is just plain out and has been for a long time. It takes forever to
back up TB of info. And at accelerated 'burn' speeds is even less
reliable.

M.2 is not much bigger than a couple 50s era Air Mail stamps.


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B3X73EE?psc=1

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-512GB-Internal-Solid-CT512M550SSD4/dp/B00ITFZTHC

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=M.2%20enclosure

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:10:08 -0800, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:

>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:27:14 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> Gave us:
>
>>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin
>><jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

[snip]

>>>DVDs are so last century.
>>
>>But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives...
>
> No. They die specifically after aging, which they do too. Storing in
>warm environs shortens that life and increases likelihood of data
>dropout.
>
> Burned discs are not burned holes, but mere polymer "impingements"
>(impressions) which have enough contrast ratio over a flat area to be
>called a bit switch (a pit). They are not pits. They can and do
>"relax".
>
>> I had one
>>die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
>>original copy.
>
> You are correct. USB drives are lame inasmuch as when they fail, they
>take the whole volume with them.
>

[snip]

I live in an air-conditioned world with exceptionally low humidity,
and each CD/DVD is saved in its own container so they can't rub and
scratch... so I have CD's dating back decades that read just fine.

Some years ago, when I still had a 5-1/4" floppy drive that a PC knew
how to talk to, I copied all my really old stuff to CD's ;-)

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:38:53 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> Gave us:

>Some years ago, when I still had a 5-1/4" floppy drive that a PC knew
>how to talk to, I copied all my really old stuff to CD's ;-)
>

Good move, because floppies are notorious for becoming unreadable.
And it is usually the drive, not the disc. Picky read/reject/give-up
code. My 2.88 laser aligned floppies NEVER EVER lost a single bit of
data ever. Try to find a drive or motherboard BIOS with support though.
Near impossible. Sad too, since they were far superior. Got left
behind with other "overpriced" (by the mindset of the day) IBM PS2 type
"proprietary think" technology, just as they ushered in Iomega's triple
overpriced utter crap, which everyone embraced simply because of
capacity numbers. I still have 2.88 drives and discs and even an old
machine somewhere with the right BIOS. I think one can still buy a PCIs
I/O card with a floppy interface on it that carries it.

I wanted to backup my DesqViewX install floppy images, and was so
frustrated trying. Then I found the dang image set online! AND QEMM
386 too! Pretty sure even Bloggs could hunt up and DL a full set within
a few minutes online, if he wasn't such a caveman.

I now look online for old legacy stuff, as trying to round up working
install packages here is not always easy. No nefarious purpose. I own
the discs, so finding already done copies is not a crime. Gotta love the
internet. AND QEMU AND DOSBox.

AND Old hardware! (I speak for myself :-)) (where's my coffee?!)(Maybe
put some Jamison's in there)

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:53:12 -0800, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> Gave us:

>
> I now look online for old legacy stuff, as trying to round up working
>install packages here is not always easy. No nefarious purpose. I own
>the discs, so finding already done copies is not a crime. Gotta love the
>internet. AND QEMU AND DOSBox.
>
> AND Old hardware! (I speak for myself :-)) (where's my coffee?!)(Maybe
>put some Jamison's in there)

Heheheh... If you own it, flaunt it, baby!

(if you do not, don't touch)(BRL!)

<https://winworldpc.com/library>

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:53:12 -0800, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

<DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:

>On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:38:53 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> Gave us:
>
>>Some years ago, when I still had a 5-1/4" floppy drive that a PC knew
>>how to talk to, I copied all my really old stuff to CD's ;-)
>>
> Good move, because floppies are notorious for becoming unreadable.
>And it is usually the drive, not the disc. Picky read/reject/give-up
>code. My 2.88 laser aligned floppies NEVER EVER lost a single bit of
>data ever. Try to find a drive or motherboard BIOS with support though.
>Near impossible. Sad too, since they were far superior. Got left
>behind with other "overpriced" (by the mindset of the day) IBM PS2 type
>"proprietary think" technology, just as they ushered in Iomega's triple
>overpriced utter crap, which everyone embraced simply because of
>capacity numbers. I still have 2.88 drives and discs and even an old
>machine somewhere with the right BIOS. I think one can still buy a PCIs
>I/O card with a floppy interface on it that carries it.
>
> I wanted to backup my DesqViewX install floppy images, and was so
>frustrated trying. Then I found the dang image set online! AND QEMM
>386 too! Pretty sure even Bloggs could hunt up and DL a full set within
>a few minutes online, if he wasn't such a caveman.

Wishful thinking ?>:-}

>
> I now look online for old legacy stuff, as trying to round up working
>install packages here is not always easy. No nefarious purpose. I own
>the discs, so finding already done copies is not a crime. Gotta love the
>internet. AND QEMU AND DOSBox.

I still (very) occasionally find a use for QEMM386.

About the only legacy stuff I use now are a tool that converts PCWrite
document files to Word; and I, once in a while, haul out the old
original OrCAD symbol libraries so I can convert those schematics to
PSpice.

>
> AND Old hardware! (I speak for myself :-)) (where's my coffee?!)(Maybe
>put some Jamison's in there)

Sounds good... I'm a Drambuie fan myself ;-)

[Jon Elson]

Jim Thompson wrote:

> On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:57:46 -0800, John Larkin
> <jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>>Spend a few bucks a month and do it right.
>
> Real helpful, John =D> Spend it where?
>
> ...Jim Thompson

Well, my solution isn't for everyone. I host my own smtp server
on my company web server. That, of course, filters NOTHING.
Then, I use the spam filters on Thunderbird. The first day it
is pretty awful, then the next day it throws everything into
the junk folder, and you go through it and "un-junk" the good
messages. After that, it is quite well trained, and VERY rarely
misclassifies any messages.

Well, works for me, anyway.

Jon

[Tom Miller]

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:c5t16apc491t0vt5d...@4ax.com...

As long as they don't age like 8 inch floppy disk. In 25 years, will you be
able to read them on your current hardware or will you need to keep legacy
devices around?

[Jim Thompson]

I kept an old WFWG machine around for many years, hung on the network,
just so I could read old floppies. When it finally started doing
weird crashes I quickly read off everything from 5-1/4" and 3-1/2"
onto CD's.

When I see signs of new equipment not supporting CD's I'll do a
similar transformation. (I have schematics saved from at least 35
years back on CD's... before that, paper, though I have converted even
some of those to PDF's ;-)

[Don Y]

On 11/10/2014 10:21 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
> On 11/10/2014 12:02 PM, John Larkin wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
>> <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
>>> <ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>>>
>>>> We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>>> have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>>> concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>>> isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>>> Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>>> backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>>> (including some from VM mainframe days).
>>>>
>>>> Cheers
>>>>
>>>> Phil Hobbs
>>>
>>> Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>>> additionally written to CD's or DVD's.
>>
>> Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
>> daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.
>>
>> DVDs are so last century.

Until, of course, you get a "single spindle failure" and discover you
now have terabytes of data that need to be recovered by a professional
service bureau!

(I keep all my "precious" archives on small spindles in redundant
configurations. My archives date back more than 30 years and I've not
lost anything -- yet! Wanna know how many minutes I spent talking on
the phone with client X in 1985 and what each call was about?? :-/ )

> I have a couple of 3-TB RAID-5 NAS boxes, one at the lab and one at home.

As with any mechanism upon which you presumably rely, you *have*, of course,
tried "dropping" a drive and rebuilding the array? <grin> I.e., you
(presumably) TRUST the array so shouldn't feel nervous about pulling a
single drive and watching to see how it fares? (after all, even if one of
the remaining drives COINCIDENTALLY died, you'd still have the HOPEFULLY
good drive in your hands with which to rebuild the array!)

With consumer-grade drives, once you get to larger capacities, a *real*
failure often results in an inability to rebuild the array before some
*other* aspect of the array goes down (e.g., another drive that is exactly
the same age/make/model as the first failing drive, has lived in the same
environment as the first failed drive, is powered by the same power supply,
driven by the same processor, etc.). You might be surprised at just how long
it takes to rebuild a large array! Keeping in mind that you have *no*
protection during that process (and, no guarantee that the array *will*
be rebuildable -- an unrecoverable read error on one of the remaining
drives can leave you with <crap>!)

If your NAS doesn't contain a hot spare, then you have to hope you "notice"
the failure and take actions to recover before the other shoe drops...

Consumer-grade NAS's are another can of worms altogether!

Have you tried pulling the *set* of drives and installing them in another
("identical") RAID enclosure to see if they will be recognized as a complete
set or (despairingly!) marked as "foreign" (and, thus, trash!)? Said another
way, when your "box" dies, how will you access/recover the data that it was
charged with protecting?

When my archive started growing, I initially adopted the approach of running
shelves -- first as JBOD's, then escalating levels of RAID. But, it was damn
near impossible to *think* in the same room (a dozen or more 15K U320
drives)! Way overkill (and, too many single points of failure!) Yet,
this was all enterprise class hardware!

If you want to keep a single archive in a single enclosure, then do yourself
a favor and step up to RAID6 -- or over to RAID10 -- or reduce the size of
the archive.

Or, plan on a preventative replication and replacement strategy.

If it's truly an *archive*, then the biggest favor you can do yourself
is to move to redundant *boxes* so they see different environments, wear,
etc.

I currently use multiple small spindles on different hosts and different
media types. I've abandoned the large shelf approaches (though the redundant
power supplies gave some level of reassurance) and am now moving towards
*individual* drives in USB enclosures. This gives you the ability to swap
drives (even "hot"!) without having to keep a boatload of sleds for different
shelves. It also lets you mix and match drive technologies (to a limited
extent -- but, far more than a shelf or dedicated appliance does!)

And, if you adopt the goal of making media "portable" between "machines"
(whether those are NAS's, workstations or whatever), then even a failure
of "The NAS" on which a volume was mounted is only a minor inconvenience...
just unplug the USB cable and plug it into another NAS, Workstation, etc.

I'd have loved to be able to find a "single drive NAS" onto which I
could install my own software and, thus, let the "drive interface" be
a network protocol instead of "USB protocol". But, the price point
of processor+power supply+medium just doesn't make sense in today's
market!

So, I'll be assembling multi-drive (USB) NAS appliances out of tiny
(SBC) headless machines. That way, I can mount 1 drive (or 20!)
concurrently as my needs dictate. Or, just SneakerNet individual drives
to whichever workstation needs "lots of access" to it! (I used to do
this with off-lined SCSI/SCA drives -- plug drive into enclosure and
spin it up for "local" access!)

[Of course, this LOW level of performance is satisfactory as it's JUST
an archive -- not a file service -- and only has to support a single user!
But, even USB2 drives can EASILY saturate 100Mb links (though my workstations
and servers are all Gb)]

[John Larkin]

We do everything RAID, and are psychotic about backups.

We do daily backups to a separate NAS box and weekly offsite backups
onto USB memory sticks, in write-once mode.

[Don Y]

Remove one of your drives (or replace it with a foreign drive) to
simulate a failure. See how long it takes to rebuild the array.

With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.

Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
expect to LOSE DATA! :>

<https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/>

[Les Cargill]

There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a
MD5 hash of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.


--
Les Cargill

[John Larkin]

On my desktop PCs (ProLiants with hot-plug RAID) I occasionally pull
out a drive for one reason or another, and poke in a replacement. It
takes about 1.5 hours to resync them.

>
>With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
>an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
>an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
>set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.
>
>Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
>you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
>expect to LOSE DATA! :>
>
><https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/>
>

We've used floppies, tape, hard drive cartriges, CDs, DVDs, and USB
sticks for backup. I don't think we've ever lost anything important.

Just make lots of copies.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:10:50 -0600, Les Cargill <lcarg...@comcast.com>
Gave us:

snip

>
>There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a
>MD5 hash of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.

That's just silly. The file copy code, and the drive hardware itself
should insure that each file was written correctly. This extra step
just further exercises the equipment, narrowing the window until a
possible failure. With the backup being at least mirrored, there is yet
another check going on. No need to worry, Les. They spent decades
incorporating that into the drive itself.

Such checks are for optical disc burn efficacy proofing, not much
else. Really big datagrams. Huge database files.

Hard to write a bad file IF files are what is being backed up.
Another reason that "backup without an OS" thread was doomed.

[David Brown]

It all depends on who you trust here - your server must be with someone
you trust (you are also trusting them with the privacy of your mail, the
reliability of your mail transfers, and with the continuity of your mail
address). If you are not keen on Gmail, that's fine - certainly a
zero-cost provider has fewer responsibilities than one who charges for
their services. At my company, the mail server is at a company we trust
to handle backups, redundancy, etc. My personal mail is on a server
that I trust - it is in my cellar at home (a dovecot imap server is easy
to get in place, and requires no maintenance).

But all this is a side issue - as I said above, client-side backup of
IMAP is no harder than client-side backup of POP3. With IMAP, you can
easily have the same backups to discs, /and/ you (should) have backups
at the server.

[miso]

David Brown wrote:

snip

> I would /never/ recommend POP - use IMAP (or exchange, if you can't
> avoid it).
>

> So with that in mind, you could do far worse than a gmail account - it
> is reliable, easy to use, works fine with IMAP, and has a workable web
> interface for when you need it.

IMAP is the way to go. For one thing, if you have multiple places 9desktop,
notebook, phone, tablet) where you access email, everything is synced. IMAP
is the only "cloud" I believe in. Even your drafts are synced. It is really
good technology.

I can't imagine a hosting company that doesn't provide email. You run
SpamAssassin and the problem is solved.
> https://spamassassin.apache.org/
A sharp 10 year old could set this up if the hosting company has the
installatron.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installatron

[Les Cargill]

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:10:50 -0600, Les Cargill <lcarg...@comcast.com>
> Gave us:
>
> snip
>
>>
>> There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a
>> MD5 hash of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.
>
> That's just silly. The file copy code, and the drive hardware itself
> should insure that each file was written correctly. This extra step
> just further exercises the equipment, narrowing the window until a
> possible failure. With the backup being at least mirrored, there is yet
> another check going on. No need to worry, Les. They spent decades
> incorporating that into the drive itself.
>

Over a span of 20 or so years, the Md5 hash thing saved me three times.

I have had, in other words, three seperate backed up files that had a
different signature than the original.

YMMV.

> Such checks are for optical disc burn efficacy proofing, not much
> else. Really big datagrams. Huge database files.
>
> Hard to write a bad file IF files are what is being backed up.
> Another reason that "backup without an OS" thread was doomed.
>

--
Les Cargill

[David Platt]

In article <m3u8ks$5l8$2...@dont-email.me>,
Les Cargill <lcarg...@comcast.com> wrote:

>DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno wrote:

>> That's just silly. The file copy code, and the drive hardware itself
>> should insure that each file was written correctly. This extra step
>> just further exercises the equipment, narrowing the window until a
>> possible failure. With the backup being at least mirrored, there is yet
>> another check going on. No need to worry, Les. They spent decades
>> incorporating that into the drive itself.
>>
>
>Over a span of 20 or so years, the Md5 hash thing saved me three times.
>
>I have had, in other words, three seperate backed up files that had a
>different signature than the original.
>
>YMMV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_corruption has some decent citations
for actual studies on the problem of "silent data corruption" - hard
drive errors that are not detected by the drive firmware or the host
O/S.

It's not a trivial problem. Silent data loss can occur as a result of
firmware bugs, bits going bad in RAM (host or drive) at a time when
they're not covered by an error-detecting/correcting code, or by
errors on the media which happen to exceed the data correction and
detection capabilities of the error correcting codes used on the media
(commonly Reed-Solomon).

The error-correcting methodologies used on the hard drives must,
necessarily, have limits. Some errors will always exceed the drive's
ability to detect them... if just the wrong set of bits in a sector
(data + ECC) gets scrambled, the data can "look good" to the error
detection algorithm. Or, in other cases, the error correction process
does kick in, but doesn't have sufficient redundency, and ends up
making the wrong correction (but thinking it's right).

In these cases, mirroring won't help you much. At best, your mirror
system will read what appear to be two "equally good, but different"
copies of the data, compare them, realize there's a problem, and send
up a flare and insist on a manual fix. Many mirroring systems read
only one copy of the data, on any given access, and only read the
other if the first turns out to be unreadable... and a system of this
sort won't even be aware that there's a problem.

Maintaining a separate validity check (MD5, SHA-whatever, etc.) can at
least let you know that your data *has* rotted.

[Don Y]

On 11/10/2014 9:10 PM, Les Cargill wrote:
> There's also something to be said for scouring the backups and doing a MD5 hash
> of all the files, comparing the original and the copy.

+42

Though you don't have to store a hash of EVERY file -- just those things that
you want to treat as "verifiable units".

E.g.,

# mount -o rdonly /Archive
# cd /Archive/somewhere/
# tar cpf - . | md5 > ~/hash

It won't tell you which of the files under /Archive/somewhere is
corrupt (if any), but, it will tell you that none *appear* to be corrupt!

[if you have thousands of files beneath that point, you don't typically
want to store a hash for *each*. rather, you want a quick way of knowing
if *all* are OK -- or, if you need to check them individually against
other copies. by not packing all of them into a tarball AND STORING THAT
TARBALL, you can often have a greater chance of recovering individual
files "easier" -- instead of having to do surgery on a corrupted tarball!]

If the verification step fails, then you can do a file-by-file compare
against other archive copies.

Having different copies on different spindles, different boxes and
different types of media greatly increases your chance of being able
to recover in the event of an error.

RAID arrays that don't scrub will never tell you of an error -- unless
you explicitly go *looking* for the file that is corrupted (of course,
you don't *know* that it is corrupted so it -- and many others -- may
have silently crapped out and you don't know about any of those LOSSES
until much later... when the bitrot has spread!)

A buddy used to backup ROM images of all his equipment on his
computer thinking that this would preserve them -- as he would
backup his computer "often"! He never considered the possibility
that an image could rot in place and, thereafter, be perpetually
preserved in its corrupted state ("No need to keep the backups
from 2 years ago... I've got monthly backups for the last year,
weekly backups for the last month and daily backups for the last
week... what could POSSIBLY go wrong??")

Sort of like backing up to TAPE, religiously... then, never retentioning
the backups! Ooops!

[Don Y]

What level RAID? What size volume? Does it scrub? Or, are you left
to "discover" your losses down the road (when you decide you *need*
a particular file)?

You should also see if you can "move" an array (or portions of it)
to another "identical" machine. E.g., anticipate how you will
deal with a general hardware failure (bad motherboard, etc.).

[Of course, if you're using it for a workstation, it's probably not
truly an archive but, rather, "working copy"]

The fact that RAID volumes couldn't *readily* be recovered (one vendor
to another, etc.) is what drove me away from the technology where
implemented in "turn key" fashion. I'm now moving all my archives
to "common" media formats so I can process individual volumes without
requiring some particular manufacturer's hardware/software.

(i.e., I should be able to examine and recover data on *any* volume
without relying on *any* particular make/manufacturer of "interface
hardware/software")

>> With large drives (failing "naturally"), the time it takes for
>> an array rebuild -- plus the likelihood that you will encounter
>> an unrecoverable read error on one of the other drives in the
>> set -- leads to alarmingly high *practical* failure rates.
>>
>> Here's one such calculator to give you an idea how *often*
>> you can expect to encounter a failure. And, how often you can
>> expect to LOSE DATA! :>
>>
>> <https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/>
>
> We've used floppies, tape, hard drive cartriges, CDs, DVDs, and USB
> sticks for backup. I don't think we've ever lost anything important.
>
> Just make lots of copies.

Yup. I keep two copies on "high throughput" media (enterprise grade
magnetic disk); a copy on commodity media (CD/DVD); some things
on tape (DLT/SDLT/Ultrium) and others on MO. *NOTHING* "on-line"
unless its being accessed!

But, like good gardens, they need to be "tended" regularly!

Also, thinking hard about what's *really* important to save is
time well spent. In the past year, I've been purging my archives
of everything "client related" (they were warned... if they haven't
kept a copy or requested mine... <shrug> let them find a service
if they don't want to handle it themselves!)

[John Larkin]

I think it's raid1, namely the same data on two drives. 62G drives for
C:, which is the OS and my apps. I have other drives, local and USB
and network, for the big stuff.

>
>You should also see if you can "move" an array (or portions of it)
>to another "identical" machine. E.g., anticipate how you will
>deal with a general hardware failure (bad motherboard, etc.).

I do that now and then, clone my work PC to the identical machines at
home and in the cabin. It always works.

The weird thing is that a drive is always a slot1 drive or a slot2
drive. I can pull a drive from my work machine, either one, and plug
in a replacement, and the drives sync. The pulled drive can be used to
boot another machine, but only in the corresponding slot. Once a
cloned machine boots, I hot-plug a drive into the empty slot and, in
an hour or so, I have two identical drives in that one, too.

I never throw anything away! Not even old D-size vellum drawings.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

picosecond timing precision measurement

[rickman]

On 11/10/2014 12:27 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:02:07 -0800, John Larkin

> <jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:36:36 -0700, Jim Thompson
>> <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:27:25 -0500, Phil Hobbs
>>> <ho...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 11/10/2014 7:53 AM, David Brown wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>>>
>>>> We agree that setting up email isn't very difficult, but we obviously
>>>> have very different philosophies of backing up stuff. As far as I'm
>>>> concerned, if it isn't backed up on discs that I can touch myself, it
>>>> isn't backed up. Server-side backup is a nice-to-have, for sure, but
>>>> Google can turn the lights out on Gmail any time it wants. I have
>>>> backups of my mail from two or three mail servers that no longer exist
>>>> (including some from VM mainframe days).
>>>>
>>>> Cheers
>>>>
>>>> Phil Hobbs
>>>
>>> Back-up... I have everything on my local hard-drive _plus_
>>> additionally written to CD's or DVD's.
>>
>> Terabyte USB hard drives are under $100 nowadays. I back up my mail
>> daily, rotating backups, and monthly propagate that to my offsite PCs.
>>
>> DVDs are so last century.
>

> But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
> die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
> original copy.

Sure they can. I have some CDs that are no longer readable. If it is
important and longer term backup, I always use multiple CDs or DVDs.
For something like a weekly backup I used to use a single disk, but now
it do it to a 3 TB hard drive since it is unlikely that I will lose both
the backup HD and the computer HD at the same time. But for the *very*
important stuff I use off site storage...

--

Rick

[David Platt]

In article <m437n0$g77$2...@dont-email.me>, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
>> die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
>> original copy.
>
>Sure they can. I have some CDs that are no longer readable.

Yup. Even mass-manufactured ("pressed") CDs and DVDs can become
unreadable after storage, typically due to oxidation of the reflective
layer. Look up "bronzing" syndrome... I had several hard-to-replace
audio CDs go bronze and fail, some years ago.

CD-R and DVD+-R discs can also deteriorate over time. I prefer to buy
blanks from higher-end manufacturers (I like Taiyo Yuden / JVC) rather
than the cut-rate outfits, as the burn success rate and survivability
seem to be better.

> If it is
>important and longer term backup, I always use multiple CDs or DVDs.

You might want to look into a neat little program called
"DVDisaster". It adds an additional level of Reed-Solomon error
correction to a CD or DVD ISO image - you can append the error
correction data to the ISO for burning, or store it separately. You
can choose the amount of additional Reed-Solomon redundancy to
add... from just-enough, to ridiculously-large.

If one or more sectors of the image become unreadable, you can slurp
in as much of the image as *is* readable, run DVDisaster in recovery
mode, and it will perform the calculations needed to restore the lost
sectors.

>For something like a weekly backup I used to use a single disk, but now
>it do it to a 3 TB hard drive since it is unlikely that I will lose both
>the backup HD and the computer HD at the same time. But for the *very*
>important stuff I use off site storage...

Diversity in redundancy is a good strategy!

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2014 13:34:35 -0800, dpl...@coop.radagast.org (David
Platt) Gave us:

>Yup. Even mass-manufactured ("pressed") CDs and DVDs can become
>unreadable after storage, typically due to oxidation of the reflective
>layer. Look up "bronzing" syndrome... I had several hard-to-replace
>audio CDs go bronze and fail, some years ago.

LaserDisc format had a host of optical disc maladies. Back then,
"multi-layer" meant "double sided", and that was achieved by laminating
two pressed and mirrored discs together.

They had "disc rot", which crept in from the edges, IIRC, and was an
oxidation effect of air getting between the laminated layers, where the
raw mirroring was then exposed to oxygen.

I haven't examined my collection in years, but I would use it as a
milestone against the age of all my bought, pressed optical discs.

I do not use burned discs for anything other than music archiving.

All my photos, etc can reside on one or more of the MANY robust hard
drives I have around here.

Maybe they burn glass masters slower now, so that the pits get burned
in better, making pressings achieve a better, longer lasting contrast
ratio.

If optical discs were actually mastered with "cylinders" and hard
sector flags, instead of a big worm, perhaps the laser could "refresh" a
burned set of bits it catches a bad read from.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2014 13:34:35 -0800, dpl...@coop.radagast.org (David
Platt) Gave us:

>Diversity in redundancy is a good strategy!
>
>

I have made money in the diversity receiver/antenna industry.

[rickman]

On 11/13/2014 4:34 PM, David Platt wrote:
> In article <m437n0$g77$2...@dont-email.me>, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
>>> die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
>>> original copy.
>>
>> Sure they can. I have some CDs that are no longer readable.
>
> Yup. Even mass-manufactured ("pressed") CDs and DVDs can become
> unreadable after storage, typically due to oxidation of the reflective
> layer. Look up "bronzing" syndrome... I had several hard-to-replace
> audio CDs go bronze and fail, some years ago.
>
> CD-R and DVD+-R discs can also deteriorate over time. I prefer to buy
> blanks from higher-end manufacturers (I like Taiyo Yuden / JVC) rather
> than the cut-rate outfits, as the burn success rate and survivability
> seem to be better.
>
>> If it is
>> important and longer term backup, I always use multiple CDs or DVDs.
>
> You might want to look into a neat little program called
> "DVDisaster". It adds an additional level of Reed-Solomon error
> correction to a CD or DVD ISO image - you can append the error
> correction data to the ISO for burning, or store it separately. You
> can choose the amount of additional Reed-Solomon redundancy to
> add... from just-enough, to ridiculously-large.

Lol! Think about this for a moment. The problem is long term backup
*and recovery*. If we are concerned with time spans that allow a CD to
oxidize, what are the chances I will have a machine that can run the
recovery software?

> If one or more sectors of the image become unreadable, you can slurp
> in as much of the image as *is* readable, run DVDisaster in recovery
> mode, and it will perform the calculations needed to restore the lost
> sectors.

*If* I still have a running copy of DVDisaster.

>> For something like a weekly backup I used to use a single disk, but now
>> it do it to a 3 TB hard drive since it is unlikely that I will lose both
>> the backup HD and the computer HD at the same time. But for the *very*
>> important stuff I use off site storage...
>
> Diversity in redundancy is a good strategy!

Yes, as long as you actually do it. lol

--

Rick

[rickman]

In 25 years I'll be dead.

--

Rick

[Don Y]

On 11/13/2014 1:05 PM, John Larkin wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:41:31 -0700, Don Y <th...@is.not.me.com> wrote:

[elided]

>>> On my desktop PCs (ProLiants with hot-plug RAID) I occasionally pull
>>> out a drive for one reason or another, and poke in a replacement. It
>>> takes about 1.5 hours to resync them.
>>
>> What level RAID? What size volume? Does it scrub? Or, are you left
>> to "discover" your losses down the road (when you decide you *need*
>> a particular file)?
>
> I think it's raid1, namely the same data on two drives. 62G drives for
> C:, which is the OS and my apps. I have other drives, local and USB
> and network, for the big stuff.

Wait until you are dealing with TB+ drives and *have* to do a rebuild
(not *choose* to do one but, instead, find yourself with a failed array).
You will sweat *bullets* for hours!

I think you will also discover that your mirror'ed arrangement is
just false security. Many implementations only "check" files as
you access them (so, any files that you don't access regularly,
can develop problems and you won't know about those problems *or*
that they are harbingers of more to come!). Some implementations
only grab the accessed file off of *one* volume and don't even
look at the second volume unless the first throws a read error.
So, the second volume (your "backup"!) could be trash before you
ever need it!

You really want an array that scrubs continuously to give you some
assurance that your data *is* still recoverable. Of course, this
often comes at some performance cost (not much for a workstation
but a fair bit for a file server that sees traffic) as the array
is CONSTANTLY being read and checked and (silently) rewritten as
errors are encountered (i.e., BEFORE you would have stumbled on
them).

>> You should also see if you can "move" an array (or portions of it)
>> to another "identical" machine. E.g., anticipate how you will
>> deal with a general hardware failure (bad motherboard, etc.).
>
> I do that now and then, clone my work PC to the identical machines at
> home and in the cabin. It always works.
>
> The weird thing is that a drive is always a slot1 drive or a slot2

Exactly. And, you will find that moving either/both of them to a different
make/model machine will leave you with *nothing* (except an offer to
INITIALIZE the drives!).

> drive. I can pull a drive from my work machine, either one, and plug
> in a replacement, and the drives sync. The pulled drive can be used to
> boot another machine, but only in the corresponding slot. Once a
> cloned machine boots, I hot-plug a drive into the empty slot and, in
> an hour or so, I have two identical drives in that one, too.

You want to make sure you keep two of each such machine and hope they
don't both die at the same time.

I have 6 RAID appliances -- all different. If one of them craps out,
it's "manual recovery mode" for me! I cant just pull the drives from
the failed NAS box and install them in another (different make/model)
and HOPE to be able to access the data.

For this reason, I have been moving my archives onto "home grown"
storage arrays so I can ensure the disks are "accessible" without
relying on a (proprietary) RAID implementation. This is a much
lower performance approach -- but, if one of the boxes dies, I
can plug the drives into any of the other machines, here, and
access them directly from there.

All of these are reasons why you *really* want to rehearse the various
types of failures that you are likely to encounter on each machine
(e.g., motherboard goes flakey and starts writing crap on BOTH drives;
software bug corrupts a volume; etc.)

There is no worse feeling than watching an archive crash! And, wondering
if your precautions against this scenario are adequate (and that you
remember them! Each RAID implementation I've seen has its own wonky
user interface... and, there are no "do overs" there!).

Years ago, I kept my (40GB) archive on 4G external SCSI drives (when they
were $1000/each) that were kept "off-line" (on a shelf in a closet). I
mounted one of them, one day, to pull something off of it. And, the
drive was unreadable!

"Yikes!"

OK, I've anticipated this -- each of the drives had a cloned copy
available (like your RAID mirror -- except the drives are unplugged/off
most of the time).

Installed the backup drive -- and *it* was unreadable!!

"WTF???"

Turns out, the OS had a bug in the disk driver that would scramble
certain make/model drives. I was lucky enough to have a dozen of
them! :<

On another machine (different OS), I began feeding MO disks to rebuild
a copy of the archive. Then, installed two fresh copies on the two
"failed" drive. Of course, I held my breath as each MO disk was read
wondering if I would encounter an unrecoverable read error (and have
to resort to the *tape* copy of the archive)

>>> We've used floppies, tape, hard drive cartriges, CDs, DVDs, and USB
>>> sticks for backup. I don't think we've ever lost anything important.
>>>
>>> Just make lots of copies.
>>
>> Yup. I keep two copies on "high throughput" media (enterprise grade
>> magnetic disk); a copy on commodity media (CD/DVD); some things
>> on tape (DLT/SDLT/Ultrium) and others on MO. *NOTHING* "on-line"
>> unless its being accessed!
>>
>> But, like good gardens, they need to be "tended" regularly!
>>
>> Also, thinking hard about what's *really* important to save is
>> time well spent. In the past year, I've been purging my archives
>> of everything "client related" (they were warned... if they haven't
>> kept a copy or requested mine... <shrug> let them find a service
>> if they don't want to handle it themselves!)
>
> I never throw anything away! Not even old D-size vellum drawings.

I moved all of my drawings onto electronic media many years ago.
Map/drawing file just takes up too much space in the house!
Having *done* that, SWMBO later decided she needed one to store
her artwork... <frown> So, no net gain in free space, here.
(and, she had to have the super huge "Arch E"-size file... TWO
of them! :-/ *AND*, somehow has managed to *fill* them!!)

I've "officially" ended support for those folks so why bother holding
onto stuff for them? (it can also be regarded as a *liability* on
my part as I'd still have to safeguard their trade secrets, etc.)

Of course, that makes it a virtual CERTAINTY that I'll receive a
call from someone desperately looking for something!! <shrug>

[Don Y]

On 11/10/2014 1:06 PM, Tom Miller wrote:

>>> DVDs are so last century.
>>
>> But DVD's and CD's don't die arbitrarily like USB drives... I had one
>> die on me last month. Fortunately it was just stuff of which I had
>> original copy.
>

> As long as they don't age like 8 inch floppy disk. In 25 years, will you be
> able to read them on your current hardware or will you need to keep legacy
> devices around?

Of course! (though I can no longer read the hard-sectored ones)
Often, its just easier to hang onto a legacy system than it is
to pull the data (and executables) off the media and find a
"compatible" means of accessing them.

Though I have been on a "binge" to get rid of all these different
tape media types that have been "forced" on me over the years.
Especially the "cheap" ones (I have no idea why folks are so
stingy -- cost conscious -- on things like that! Jeez, the data
is worth thousands of times more than the media+drive! Why try to
save a couple of dollars on something cheap/flimsy/dubious?)

[David Platt]

In article <m43b6o$shh$3...@dont-email.me>, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Lol! Think about this for a moment. The problem is long term backup
>*and recovery*. If we are concerned with time spans that allow a CD to
>oxidize, what are the chances I will have a machine that can run the
>recovery software?

It's open-source, and written in C, and in its basic form it runs from
the command line. No GUI fancies.

>> If one or more sectors of the image become unreadable, you can slurp
>> in as much of the image as *is* readable, run DVDisaster in recovery
>> mode, and it will perform the calculations needed to restore the lost
>> sectors.
>
>*If* I still have a running copy of DVDisaster.

I wouldn't expect that an executable, built today, would be useful in
25 years.

The source code, and the underlying math, though... those ought to be
portable, and not difficult to port.

I'd be more concerned about DVD *drives* ceasing to be available.
Finding (e.g.) a 5.25" floppy drive these days isn't easy... even 3.5"
drives are harder to come by.

>> Diversity in redundancy is a good strategy!
>
>Yes, as long as you actually do it. lol

Yup. The inevitable "oh, damned" moment tends to occur at just those
times when you haven't done what you knew you should. At least,
that's what happens to me.

It's like they say about guys injured while working with power tools.
The commonest remark, in the emergency room, seems to be "Yeah, I knew
I really shouldn't be doing that."

[rickman]

On 11/13/2014 6:50 PM, David Platt wrote:
> In article <m43b6o$shh$3...@dont-email.me>, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Lol! Think about this for a moment. The problem is long term backup
>> *and recovery*. If we are concerned with time spans that allow a CD to
>> oxidize, what are the chances I will have a machine that can run the
>> recovery software?
>
> It's open-source, and written in C, and in its basic form it runs from
> the command line. No GUI fancies.
>
>>> If one or more sectors of the image become unreadable, you can slurp
>>> in as much of the image as *is* readable, run DVDisaster in recovery
>>> mode, and it will perform the calculations needed to restore the lost
>>> sectors.
>>
>> *If* I still have a running copy of DVDisaster.
>
> I wouldn't expect that an executable, built today, would be useful in
> 25 years.

If you don't have the executable, how do you recover your data?

> The source code, and the underlying math, though... those ought to be
> portable, and not difficult to port.

Oh, you write your own code... lol

> I'd be more concerned about DVD *drives* ceasing to be available.
> Finding (e.g.) a 5.25" floppy drive these days isn't easy... even 3.5"
> drives are harder to come by.

I believe floppies have been around for 25 years. Over 30 years actually.

>>> Diversity in redundancy is a good strategy!
>>
>> Yes, as long as you actually do it. lol
>
> Yup. The inevitable "oh, damned" moment tends to occur at just those
> times when you haven't done what you knew you should. At least,
> that's what happens to me.
>
> It's like they say about guys injured while working with power tools.
> The commonest remark, in the emergency room, seems to be "Yeah, I knew
> I really shouldn't be doing that."

And then there is the recovery process that is seldom tested only to
find it doesn't work as expected.

--

Rick

[Jasen Betts]

On 2014-11-13, David Platt <dpl...@coop.radagast.org> wrote:
> In article <m43b6o$shh$3...@dont-email.me>, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Lol! Think about this for a moment. The problem is long term backup
>>*and recovery*. If we are concerned with time spans that allow a CD to
>>oxidize, what are the chances I will have a machine that can run the
>>recovery software?
>
> It's open-source, and written in C, and in its basic form it runs from
> the command line. No GUI fancies.
>
>>> If one or more sectors of the image become unreadable, you can slurp
>>> in as much of the image as *is* readable, run DVDisaster in recovery
>>> mode, and it will perform the calculations needed to restore the lost
>>> sectors.
>>
>>*If* I still have a running copy of DVDisaster.
>
> I wouldn't expect that an executable, built today, would be useful in
> 25 years.

yeah, I tried to run sopwith in dosemu without much success.
black cauldron runs ok though,

> The source code, and the underlying math, though... those ought to be
> portable, and not difficult to port.

yeah, probably a better way. as long as witten in a standard language
like C or C++ where features don't get dropped, and not someting mushy.

perhaps look at "parchive"

--
umop apisdn

[John Larkin]

Haven't had any problems so far. I have rotated drives in and out of
both RAID slots, and dropped off security copies, saved in baggies, as
fallbacks. Cloning to other machines has always worked.

[Don Y]

Chances are, you will "discover" this problem when it is in a position
to bite you most mercilessly. Unless your array is know to scrub (or
is deliberately TOLD to scrub) periodically, you have no way of
assuring yourself that the data on one volume (in a mirror) agrees with
the data on the other(s). Or, that all the content of a multivolume
(striped, RAID5, etc.) array is consistent and intact.

Sort of like never realizing the batteries in the flashlight are DEAD
until you *need* the flashlight!

[For non-trivial array sizes, these operations are VERY time-consuming;
consider how long it takes to read three TB+ drives assuming access to
them can be given, exclusively, to the entity that is validating their
contents. You're often talking many, many hours (days)!]

For anything other than enterprise-class devices, chances are, these
sorts of activities aren't happening automatically (in the RAID subsystem).
For consumer *appliances*, well... <shrug>

What's worse is the vulnerability you experience when the hardware that
supported the RAID becomes dubious (or, outright fails). Firmware
problems in the controllers, firmware incompatibilities in the drives
*you* may have chosen ("unqualified for this application"), hardware
faults (power supply, solder failures, etc.), etc.

Or, you've pulled the drives thinking you are going to just slap
them into your "new machine"... only to discover that the new machine
doesn't recognize them as a live array -- and promptly offers to
initialize them for you!

[I pulled four 250G drive sleds out of a machine thinking I could slip
them into the "new", almost identical machine. Then, "recycled" the
old machine -- only to discover that I had to run back and "recover"
it in order to pull the data off the drives! At 100Mb network speeds
(the only way off of the machine since the drives couldn't be "ported"),
it was painfully slow work.]

Years ago, there was no such thing as interoperability among RAID vendors
and implementations. *Your* disks were essentially *bound* to *your*
machine! Another model RAID controller by the same vendor (or, gasp, a
different vendor) would be a crap shoot as to whether it would do anything
other than see your disks (containing all your precious data) as anything
more than "bulk (*blank*!) storage media".

DDF now makes this less of a problem -- but, you're wise to VERIFY that
it actually *works* and isn't just an marketing "check-off item"! And,
probably set up a stand-alone box that folks are trained to use to
recover "damaged" arrays/drives -- or a service bureau that you are
comfortable calling on "in a hurry". There's always a temptation to
"try something"... but, with media, there are no Mulligan's! :<

[John Larkin]

I blew out the RS232 port on my PC once. I went down the hall, grabbed
another identical machine (we have spares), plugged in my drives, and
everything was back up in 10 minutes on the new box. The worst part
was crawling under my desk to mess with the cables.

The HP boxes are pretty good: hot-plug RAID drives, redundant power
supplies, redundant fans, redundant BIOS (!), ECC ram, all that. Not
cheap, but brutally reliable.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 17:06:47 -0800, John Larkin
<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> Gave us:

You can get G6 dual XEON DL360s with SAS and dual or quad GbE on ebay
all day. Most are mint, some are new, as folks all want the latest and
that is G8 or G9 now.

You should buy a few. I am serious. They are like 1U.

I can remember buying up every HP 3457A we could find, because they
were all selling for like $150 each and they were $1500 meters!

I still have one, because we bought more than we needed in the shop.

NICE meters. NEVER lose cal either (truly).

Those computers would be a similar type investment.

I'd get one if my budget were not so tight right now.

[Don Y]

I did that on my first PC (bad isolator in a piece of kit I was prototyping).
As I buy two of everything, I just moved the prototype over to the spare
machine (identical software, etc.) and put the "serial+parallel ISA board"
in a pile to bring to vendor for replacement.

"Gee, I dunno what happened! It just went 'pop'..." :>

> The HP boxes are pretty good: hot-plug RAID drives, redundant power
> supplies, redundant fans, redundant BIOS (!), ECC ram, all that. Not
> cheap, but brutally reliable.

I've given up trying to sort out "best" and "avoid at all costs"
vendors/products.

I volunteered for many years at a facility that recycled electronic
products. My role being to try to recover/repurpose kit to divert
it from landfills, get it into the hands of folks (schools, charities)
that could use it (but couldn't afford to *buy* it), etc.

You'd be just as likely to see a pallet of commodity desktop machines
(figure 1.5 - 3 yr life cycles in business environment) as you would
enterprise *servers*! And, just as likely to find servers with
bad motherboards, power distribution boards (redundant power supplies
don't help you if the mechanism that shares the load fails!), CPUs
toasted from failed fans, etc.

Of course, just because they are bought as servers doesn't mean the
owner is operating them correctly *as* servers! E.g., no idea what
their cold aisles may have been...

The only machines that I *never* seem to find "bad" (i.e., ready to run
on the application of power) are Alpha servers. IBM, HP, Dell, Google,
etc. all seem to have problems (often a common problem for a particular
make/model).

[Of course, buying these sorts of things by the *pound*, as surplus,
all that extra chassis weight is hard to swallow: "Cripes! Can't
we put it in a lighter chassis and buy it for $10 instead of $20?
I sure don't need to be carrying all that 'extra' metal!" :> E.g.,
my BladeCenter is close to 250? pounds and it's just 7U! (14 dual
Xeon's each with dual Gb ethernet and dual 70G SAS drives, quad 2000W
power supplies, two blower modules, etc. -- all hot swappable. OTOH,
I can *stand* on it without fear of collapsing the case...]

The surprising revelation was that SAS/SCSI/FC enterprise drives
tend to have far more usable life than the servers in which they
reside! (not true of consumer/run-of-the-mill PATA/SATA drives
in desktop machines). I had expected the oppposite -- that the
drives run so much hotter -- especially when "up" 24/7/365 as
in a server.

I suspect the drive manufacturers are aware of this and take measures
to prolong their operating lives. Including cooling to that portion
of the chassis.

OTOH, the box makers probably think a couple of redundant fans will keep
the rest of the box "comfortable".

[JW]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 17:51:17 -0800 DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote in Message id:
<p2cd6a9gsceq536vm...@4ax.com>:

> I can remember buying up every HP 3457A we could find, because they
>were all selling for like $150 each and they were $1500 meters!
>
> I still have one, because we bought more than we needed in the shop.
>
> NICE meters. NEVER lose cal either (truly).

Until the battery dies... Better check it!